Exit the Mooch

Which is probably a good thing. We doubt we would have liked you very mooch.

Mr.Scaramucci had been a Hillary supporter. He raised money for Barack Obama. He supported gun control and gay marriage.

It must have been tough to give up his ideals, his principles...whatever they were. He gave up his investment firm, SkyBridge Capital, too.

For what? Fame? Power? Status?

When opportunity presented itself, the ex-Goldman guy did what the rest of the Goldman alums – Cohn, Mnuchin, Bannon, etc. – did. He fell in love with Donald Trump.

"I love the president," Scaramucci proclaimed last week.

But the course of love is rarely straight. Instead, it meanders, collects in stagnant pools, only to run suddenly over the edge and splash upon the rocks below.

Finally, it often ends up in a swamp. What is remarkable about "The Mooch's" affair with "The Donald" is that it all happened so fast.

Just a few short years ago, in 2015, Mr.Scaramucci told Fox Business that Mr.Trump's palaver was "anti-American" and that he was just a "hack politician".

That must have been the most inaccurate assessment of his future boss ever made. "The Donald" is the opposite of a hack. Hacks are reliably dull and serviceable, like a kitchen faucet. Trump is more like a loose fire hose, shooting water all over the place and soaking everyone.

Nor is Trump a politician. Politicians are smooth operators who will say whatever they need to say to get what they want. What is endearing and refreshing about Mr.Trump is that he is not a politician.

As near as we can tell, the president is more like a playground bully. In and out of scrapes all his life...failed casinos, failed marriages...vulgar, indecent, and mean...he is as "The Mooch" described him – an "inherited money dude from Queens County" who somehow ended up in the White House.

And anti-American? Wrong again.

Mr.Trump captures the zeitgeist of his era better than anyone – when middle-aged Republicans long to hear the F-word in public...law-abiding Christians from Iowa can't wait to send a drone to kill people in the Hindu Kush...and every geezer, coast to coast, seems happy to have the feds pay for his pills with money his children and grandchildren haven't even earned yet.

Mr.Trump is a brawler. Now, he's in the fight of his life, and he loves it.

Around him, his lackeys, sycophants, and handlers scrap for places at the table – the Goldman guys on the left, protecting the fake money system...the generals on the right, protecting the crony empire.

A third of the country loves him. A third of it hates him. And a third – the most intelligent group – doesn't give a damn.

Meanwhile, the whole spectacle is entertaining for everyone, like a traffic accident or a nasty divorce. The press can't take its eyes off Donald Trump.

It's Trump. All Trump. All the time. And the economy seems to have slowed down to watch, too; economic growth rates have fallen in half. And stocks keep going up, no matter what happens in Washington.

Mr.Scaramucci was a bit player. Walk on. Walk off.

Just as he mistook Mr.Trump for a hack politician, he seems to have taken the part he was offered without reading the script through to the end, where it becomes clear he was brought in as a fall guy.

It is hard to believe he flubbed his lines when he dished on Priebus and Bannon to a reporter from The New Yorker. Didn't this newly minted White House communications director realize that a reporter's job is to report?

If he didn't understand that, he certainly sets a new standard of imbecility – even for the White House.

Mr.Scaramucci performed useful service in getting Priebus and Spicer out of the way. But then, it was time for him to go, too.

The other Goldman guys found him embarrassing. And the president's new chief of staff, retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, "asserting his command," as the newspapers put it, sent him back to the dressing room.

In every headline we read this morning, the narrative is the same: Scaramucci was too foul-mouthed and foolhardy for the team, so Kelly, bringing military discipline and order to the White House, ousted him.

Everywhere, too, this change is hailed as a "step in the right direction."

Is it?

We doubt it. On all fronts – right and left, domestic and overseas, warfare and welfare – things remain just as they were. Except that "The Mooch" has left the stage.

Bill Bonner is founder and owner of Agora Inc., one of America's largest consumer newsletter publishers. Best-selling author and globe-trotting correspondent since 1999 for the Daily Reckoning email, he is chairman of family-wealth advisory Bonner & Partners, and co-author with his son Will of Family Fortunes: How to Build Family Wealth and Hold Onto It for 100 Years (Wiley, 2012).

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